Sexuality needs healthy aggression

Attention to aggression is a feature of the Gestalt approach in sex therapy. My experience as a psychotherapist shows that most sexual difficulties are related to the distorted functioning of healthy aggression in a couple. It can be suppressed, misdirected or hypertrophied. At the same time, it is important to distinguish healthy aggression, without which contact is impossible, from violence, which, unfortunately, can also be present in the relationship of partners.

What is the difference between healthy aggression and violence?

First criterion Feeling of power, powerlessness or omnipotence.

Powerlessness and omnipotence are associated with violence, and power with healthy aggression. The violence associated with a sense of omnipotence can be described as: “If I want, I do it, regardless of whether the other agrees or not.”

In a powerless situation, the perpetrator wants to hit or harm because he can’t get what he wants, because he’s being ignored, or because he has nothing to lose. In this case, the main motivation is not to get what you want, but to express your anger.

And if we feel our power, we feel able to do something, we go towards another person, not in order to destroy him, but in order to meet him and begin to exist in his eyes.

Second criterion – behavior within the limits that are set by the laws and rules of life in society.

Violence is always accompanied by going beyond the law, beyond the rules that govern our interaction with each other in society, and healthy aggression respects these limits and can be expressed within the limits set by law. At the same time, each of us may have our own ideas about the limits inherited from the parental family, and sometimes they do not coincide with partners: for one, a loud voice, a high tone are unacceptable and perceived as violence, and for another, this is a common way of talking in the family.

Third criterion – understanding what contact is.

Healthy aggression assumes that we are aware of the existence of another as a separate being with our own interests, desires, plans, and we have the intention to meet this person halfway.

Violence, on the contrary, is accompanied by a break in relations: the other becomes an object to be destroyed, or his life, his interests are not taken into account at all. Thus, aggression leads to full-fledged contact, and violence leads to a break in contact.

Why is aggression necessary?

The founder of Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls, assigned an important place to aggression in personality development.¹. Aggression is necessary to live, but it is even more necessary to enjoy sex, and we will see that it is not healthy aggression as such that creates problems, but the distorted use of the aggressive principle.

Of course, tenderness and intimacy are also part of sexuality, but without a sufficient level of aggression, desire fades away, it cannot be sustained. If, on the other hand, aggression is too strong or uncontrollable, “going towards someone, towards someone” in this case turns into “act against the other, not paying attention to the other”: the other is reduced to the object, and we we get into the realm of sexual violence.

We use the same neural and hormonal pathways to control sexual behavior and aggression. The male hormone testosterone, which Gestalt therapist Serge Ginger called the “hormone of conquest,” plays a leading role in both men and women in regulating their aggressive behavior. And two neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin, in turn, respectively, increase or suppress our sexual and aggressive impulses.

“Aggression and sexuality in our archaic brain are regulated by the same neural connections, the same neurotransmitters, the same testosterone,” writes Serge Ginger. “And so, by unblocking our aggressive emotions, we simultaneously release our sexual energy.”².

These observations are consistent with my conclusions based on many years of practice: almost all sexual difficulties, if they are not of a physiological nature and are not associated with a side effect of taking certain drugs, can be reduced to difficulties in controlling aggression – it can be directed at oneself, its direction may be distorted, it may be unexpressed, suppressed or excessive.

Of course, the topic of sexuality is always associated with suffering, but it also contains vitality, a strong impulse to life. This impulse, which is directly related to healthy aggression, is especially noticeable in group work. It helps us embrace deep suffering and allow it to coexist with moments of intense pleasure. I think that this mixture is fruitful and can give hope to some hearts: “So it is possible after all.”

¹ F. Perls “Ego, hunger and aggression” (Sense, 2010).

² S. Ginger “Gestalt. The art of contact” (Academic project, 2015).